The University Expert Press Room – COP15

Built on WordPress (yay!-) using the Studiopress Lifestyle theme, the site provided a single point of access to content and several OU academics with relevant expertise in the area in order to “support” journalists writing around issues raised over the course of the COP15 Climate Talks last year.

The site makes good use of categories to partition content into several areas (each, of course, with its own feed:-) So for example, there are categories for News, Research and Opinion, the latest items from which are also highlighted on the front page:

The site also syndicated a feed from an OU Audioboo site where OU academics were posting audio commentaries on related matters:

Anyway, this thematic press room seems like a great idea to me – though I’d have also liked to see a place for 200-500 word CC (attribution) licensed explanatory posts of the sort that could be used to populate breakout factual explanation boxes (with attribution) in feature articles, for example.

Compared to the traditional press release site (which apparently serves as much as an OU timeline/corporate memory device as anything, something that hadn’t occurred to me before…) this topical press room offers another perspective on the whole “social media press release” thang (e.g. Social Media Releases and the University Press Office).

in order to see what sorts of content fit there might be going from copy on the OU Press Room to the material that is typically published on news media sites. If the content doesn’t fit, no-one will re-use it, right?

Maybe next time?!;-) (If you know of such a comparative critique, please post a link back to here or add a comment below;-)

4 thoughts on “The University Expert Press Room – COP15”

I really like the part with the experts, great idea. There is an other “not usual” press site focused on industrial topic http://www.industrial-newsroom.com This one is also quite interesting with focusing on a special topic and with the possibility of posting videos.